Glossary Table: PDF Formatting Issues

@dave.dillon - I hope you’re doing well!

I’ve spoken with the support team at Pressbooks to narrow in on the formatting issues we found in the book’s Glossary, where URL text would not wrap properly to adjust to the page widths. The main culprits have to do with the changed font-size and line-height of body text in the book, and the Pressbooks team will be looking into resolving this bug.

For the moment, however, they have recommended a short-term solution: reset the font, font-size, and line-height on this particular table to the original settings. This does resolve the text-wrap issue, however means that text in this Glossary table is slightly smaller than the rest of the body text (and also in a different font). See a screenshot of how this solution might look in the PDF:


Would you want to go ahead and implement these changes? I could make the necessary adjustments, and leave it to you to pull a new set of exports and formats when you have wrapped up your semester.

Let me know how you’d like to proceed, or if you have any questions. I will keep you posted if I hear anything more from the Pressbooks team.

Hi @dave.dillon, I have an update for you about the Glossary table, and another possible solution. If you recall, we had noticed that the URLs in the table were being cut off in the Print PDF file. As I had described in the previous post, one option was to reset the font-size and line-height to the original settings and pull a new set of exports.

Now, the Pressbooks team has made it possible to display the table in landscape mode in the PDF output, and in so doing, allow for proper display of the URLs and other longer text in the tables. So the second option would be to display the Glossary table in landscape mode in the print PDF. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Glossary chapter, and open the editor
  2. Click on the table in the visual editor
  3. Click on the Table option from the formatting toolbar
  4. Select Table Properties
  5. Select Class --> Standard Landscape --> Okay
  6. Save your changes to the chapter
  7. Export new PDF files to see the change

As I noted, the table in the other formats should display vertically, and you will see this change in the print and digital PDF files. Let me know which option you decide to go with, or if you have any questions.